Agenda for SLAC-SEECS Meeting December 15, 2011.

General

Ghulam didn't have account before. Sadia sent him new forms to get registered in SLAC directory.

Suggestion for Pingtable Regional Data selection - Anjum and Amber

Amber has added PERN_POP, PERN_NON-POP and regional groups to pingtable.pl.

IPV6 - Anjum and Ghulam

IPV6 machine is working fine. Ghulam installed pinger2 on it and tried to collect data. But it was unable to resolve the IPV6 address. Seems like we need to do some changes in the whole architecture to make it workable with IPV6.

A possible project would be to make traceroute.pl work on a dual stack IPv6 host (say to traceroute to ipv6.google.com). Will need to look at gethostbyname etc. Is there any interest?

Another is to make pingtable.pl and getdata.pl IPV6 capable.

ICFA and HEC Report - Anjum and Amber

Amber is working on ICFA annual report.

Amber is working on HEC Six Monthly report.

• POP to POP analysis: Analysis from Pern POP QAU Islamabad to main POP nodes of each region.
• MIN RTT findings and traceroute results from POP to NON-POP nodes
• Outliers
• For the future reports you can use September report as the border line for good and bad nodes. For example some metric threshold value would be: Jitter >0.5, Avg RTT >75ms, loss > x is bad.

Imdad, a PhD student at SEECS will be helping Amber in HEC six monthly report. Amber and Imdad will have a meeting at 11pm Friday 16th December  to discuss the report.

PingER Explorer - Amber

• Amber has put together an email list of PingER contacts to send the video to. We will send email about Explorer to the list. Tomorrow.

Status of Pakistani PingER hosts - Amber

As updated on 12/15/2011.

Responsible person: Joun Muhammad

All nodes deployed at PERN PoPs are being upgraded to enhance security. I had discussed with Umar as to what security features should be implemented on these nodes. If anyone notices a change in working of PoP nodes within next 2 weeks, please highlight it so that we can fix the problem.

HEC is sending out letters to the contact persons (who are non-cooperative) after which the nodes will be more reliable. 2-3 weeks will show much more stable nodes.

PingER traceroute archive site - Sadia and Ghulam

Ghulam will send the list of monitoring nodes that are down. There should be script which collects the status of nodes per-day. Will be done once new pinger installment is done

PingER archive site - Ghulam

A few days back when Ghulam was working on database on archive site, it crashed. As a result Ghulam had to rebuild it from scratch. We might want to look into the suggestion of making a back up file. The backup would be on a seperate machine. Backup file can be replaced by a new backup file every night or every 2 days or may be every week.

PerfSonar Schema is found to be more manageable and if we could use it, then we can easily merge pingER with PerfSonar. Hence, Ghulam will work on getdata.pl to modify the scripts(without threads).

Sadia will work on migrating data from flat files to the new databases.

• Ghulam with the help of Zafar is removing threads and adding parallel loops. This would help in fixing the sorting issues of pintable.pl. Update?
• Next step is to migrate old data to the new database. Since the pinger data has many anomalies it will need some careful filtering. Update?

Adding MOS and Alpha to pingtable.pl (awaits pingtable-db & getdata-db.pl working first)

• Analysis scripts to add Mean Opinion Score and Alpha, some things need to be correctly configured. It has been deployed athttp://pinger.seecs.edu.pk/cgi-bin/pingtable.pl for testing.
• Alpha and MOS to be implemented at SLAC site. Sadia will be doing this with the help of Zafar. Currently Ghulam and Farhan are working on synchronizing the SLAC and SEECS scripts.

TULIP - Sadia and Bilal

Following targets in Europe are not plotted on maps.

For example the first target can be explored here . This can be compared to a target which can be plotted on the map .

Bilal looked into it and found that nodes are plotted using other GeoIP and IP tracking tools. Possibly there is some error in Tulip map code because of which these nodes are not plotted on Tulip map.

He found that the problem is in load function. He will resolve it and will take help from Faisal if required.

CBG TULIP Integration -- FYP (Bilal)

• Bilal did some stress testing. The landmarks are 331 while the targets will be the ones generated by Sadia. He will compare the results with the 4 month old results with 59 hosts.
• Bilal has completed the stress testing for North America and Europe .
• Stress testing for South Asia is discussed. suggestion: Add one more column to the table which would be GeoIP distance from the Lat Long in Node-details. We think that Node-detail would be more accurate for Pakistan however GeoIP might be more accurate for Srilanka, Nepal, Bangladesh etc

PerfSONAR (Pakistan)

• PerfSONAR at SEECS: PerfSONAR throughput and latency nodes are now up and running at SEECS. Hostnames and corresponding IP adresses are:**  throughput measurement node: http://psbw.seecs.edu.pk/ (http:115.186.132.154/toolkit/) 
  • latency measurement node: http://psla.seecs.edu.pk/ (http://115.186.132.155/toolkit/)
• Select options under "Service Graphs" to view throughput or latency graphs. Added 5 Stratum 1 NTP servers to cater for clock delay and everything seems to work fine.
• There are some interesting one-way latency graphs at 115.186.132.155 (SEECS PerfSONAR Latency node). Dst to Src (e.g MIT to SEECS) latency is less than Src to Dst (e.g SEECS to MIT) latency. This might uncover some trends in outbound network traffic from Pakistan.
• Bilal and Ghulam will have a meeting with Zafar to know about PerfSonar and to maintain it in future. Update?

Possible projects

• There can be a paper kind of talking on Pinger if we could just find the right conference. MCN, ICC and Globecomm do provide network monitoring topics. We can talk of GEO-Location experiences. For example within Pakistan it works fine, however as we go within regions or continents this gets worse. We can publish some stats on that for example. We are yet not ready for Tulip paper.
• See [https://confluence.slac.stanford.edu/display/IEPM/Future+Projects].
• Extend the NODEDETAILS data base to allow entry support for whether the host is currenty pingable. 
• Extend Checkdata to provide emails automatically, see [https://confluence.slac.stanford.edu/display/IEPM/Extend+checkdata+to+make+it+more+useful]. Many of the ideas in the script node-contacts.pl are a step in this direction.
• Improve the PingER2 installation procedures to make it more robust. This might be something for the person(s) in Pakistan who are responsible for installing PingER2 at the Pakistani monitoring sites. They probably have found where the failures occurs. Also look at the FAQ, and ping_data.pl which has been improved to assist in debugging, could it be further improved (e.g. provide access to the httpd.conf file so one can see if it properly configured)? There are 2 students working on the PingER archive. Is this something they could work on?
•  [Fix PingER archiving/analysis package to be IPv6 conformant|IEPM:Make PingER IPV6 compliant]. Will build a proposal for an IPv6 testbed. They will try various transition techniques. A proposal has been prepared and that has been submitted to PTA. Adnan is a co PI. It is being evaluated today.  A small testbed has been established in SEECS and the plan to shift some of the network to IPv6. Bilal is part of 3 students involved with PingER and they will be involved with IPv6. They are porting the PingER archive site site to using a database. They have redeveloped the archive site using Umar's documentation. They have set up a small test archive site. They have gathering, archiving, analysis. They will design a new database. They will also try a port of PingER to IPv6. 
• Look at RRD event detection based on thresholds and how to extend, maybe adding plateau algorithm. Umar's algorithm did  not work in a predictable manner. 
• Provide near realtime plots of current pinger data using getdata_all.pl/wget. It will work as a CGI script with a form to select the host, the ping size, and the time frame to plot. It will use wget or getdata_all.pl to get the relevant data and possibly RRD/smokeping to display the data. 

Future meeting time - Les

1. Next meeting on Wednesday 21st December at 8:00 pm in US and Thursday 22nd December at 9:00am in Pakistan.